How to Ground Anything

A practical walkthrough for taking a “this seems right” statement and grounding it into invariants (P/C) and attractors — without losing nuance.

walkthrough artifact vs attractor P10-first C12-aware

The grounding loop (10 moves)

1) Name the artifact (or admit it’s an attractor)

Write down what you are grounding: a policy, claim, incident, metric, or design decision. If it’s a vibe, a direction, or a “center of gravity,” label it an attractor.

Artifact: discrete, addressable, witnessed, stable ID.
Attractor: continuous, evolving, inferred center.

2) Draw the boundary (P1)

What’s inside the system boundary? What’s outside? Where are the interfaces? What crossings matter?

List at least 3 interfaces: “user → app”, “team → vendor”, “service → database”.
If you can’t draw the boundary, you will misattribute causes (C8).

3) Identify agents and capacity (P2)

Who is expected to understand and choose? What is their capacity in context (time pressure, knowledge, power asymmetry)?

Capacity constraints are often the hidden reason “consent” fails.

4) Locate authorization gates (P3)

Where does the system allow boundary crossing? What authorizes it: explicit consent, mandate, delegated authority, contract?

If authorization is implicit, expect coercion dynamics and drift.

5) Make comparators explicit (P10)

This is the keystone move. Ask: “By what comparator does this count as good?” Then tier it:

Constitutional comparator: revisable only via legitimate governance (P9).
Operational comparator: revisable under feedback (P6).

If you skip this, the system will choose comparators implicitly (often via power or incentives).

6) Identify legibility requirements (P4)

Can affected parties understand the decision and its implications in their frame? If not, you’re at risk of “agreement without understanding.”

7) Build the ledger (P5)

What flows are tracked (time, money, risk, responsibility, information)? What is missing?

Missing flows reappear as hidden debt.
Boundary/ledger mismatch is the engine of C5.

8) Map feedback loops and delays (P6)

What monitors, audits, incident reviews, or user reactions correct the system? What are the delays?

Delayed feedback produces oscillation and miscalibration.

9) Drift scan and attractors (P7)

What behaviors are rewarded? What becomes easier over time? Where will the system drift if left alone?

Watch for “compliance replaces truth” (C7).
Watch for “metric becomes sacred” (C11).

10) Reversibility and governance (P8, P9)

What’s the rollback/exit/appeal path? If reversal is hard, governance must scale with impact.

High-impact, low-reversibility decisions require stronger governance and higher consent thresholds.

Composite quick-checks

C5 Boundary/Accounting Misalignment — are costs/benefits crossing boundaries without ledger alignment?
C10 Level Mismatch — are you optimizing the wrong level?
C11 Illegitimate Constitutional Comparator — did an operational metric become untouchable?
C12 Threshold Cascade — are there tipping points where small changes become discontinuous?

Mini walkthrough example (IT policy)

Claim: “All network devices must have MFA and centralized logging.”

P1: boundary = managed network vs unmanaged; interfaces = VPN, admin consoles, APIs
P3: authorization = MFA for admin crossings
P5: ledger = logs are the event ledger
P6: feedback = alerts + incident review
C12: misconfig risk; outage can cascade if logging/identity systems are brittle
C11: if “100% compliance” becomes sacred over availability, drift risk rises

Copy/paste prompt (ground it)

Ground the following statement or artifact using the Quantum Invariants spine.

Return:
1) P-map (P1..P10): apply/not apply + 1-3 bullets
2) C-map (C1..C12): apply/not apply + 1-3 bullets
3) Missing grounding effects (at least 5)
4) Comparator tiering (P10): constitutional vs operational
5) Cascade scan (C12) if nonlinear risk is present
6) Assumptions / unknowns

Artifact:
[PASTE HERE]

More templates: /ai/prompts.html